The Mermaid of Brooklyn (37 page)

As the words tumbled out of my mouth, I realized they were true and that I had not known them in time. I was grouchy and sad and difficult to be around a lot of the time, and I’d blamed Harry for not making me into a different kind of person. And when Harry got grouchy and sad and difficult to be around—as I’d always known he was, and it was probably part of what had attracted me to him in the first place, because there was some of me in him, because I thought he might understand me—I felt wronged and put upon, and maybe, just maybe, I’d done my part to drive him away despite myself.

The next day I felt a bit woozy, as if with honesty hangover. I had said too much too openly to my poor little bride who had wanted only, after all, to live a fairy tale. And who could blame her?

She’s not even going to want me to do her dress now. Who wants such a cynic behind your bridal veil?

Don’t be silly. She needed to hear those things. Every gown fitting should come with such good advice.

She didn’t need to hear those things from me, though.

Why not? Haven’t you ever gotten great advice from a beautician?

I guess if I went to beauticians, I would. And I would probably have better hair, too. Wait.

Hmm?

Did she hear those things from me?

Why, whatever do you mean, my pet?

Or did she hear them from you?

You’re being silly. What’s the difference?

I’m starting not to know. Is there a difference? Is there a me left in there without you?

What an exhausting question. It’s too early in the morning for this kind of thing.

It
was
early in the morning. The apartment was dark, Betty still snoozing, when Rose and I colonized the living room. Anne’s dress hung on the wall, its hems optimistically basted. Outside the living room windows, trucks idled in the street, making deliveries to the block’s bodegas and bars. I wished for an Inspector Gadget arm to erupt from my shoulder socket, snake robotically down into the street, click off each roaring motor. Rose squirmed on her belly on the play mat. I left her there to go make coffee. And then there it was, one of the many moments parents have when they simultaneously think
Yay!
and
Oh, no!
The baby started to crawl. By which I mean she’d pushed up onto her hands and inched her way forward, sort of dragging her legs like a very adorable war veteran. “Wow, Rosie! You’re doing it!” I said, toasting her with my mug. “Fucking hell!” I put my steaming coffee on a high shelf and made a quick
sweep of the room, gathering up Betty’s cherished choking hazards into my shirt like a child picking blueberries. Rose squealed with excitement. I guess I should have, too. I would have, maybe, if I hadn’t been thinking about Harry and how he was missing it.

Later, Sylvia came over, looking about ten years older than usual. It was unsettling to see her without makeup on, like seeing a bespectacled friend on the first day after Lasik, or a fleshy coworker at a pool party.
Compose yourself, Sylvia,
I wanted to say.
Get your shit together!
Her hair even seemed to be obeying the theory of gravity. I thought of my own unstylish mother, wondered how she was faring on the dark continent.

I handed Sylvia a cup of coffee. Betty immediately bounded toward her, as if magnetically drawn to the steaming burn risk. “Gwamma! Uppa uppa!” Sylvia put her coffee down and let Betty scramble into her lap, enduring the tutorial that followed on the grimy My Little Pony we’d recently acquired at a stoop sale and how you combed its hair with her special black comb. During the lecture, I scooped up Rose and arranged her in the high chair with a couple of wooden spoons and a casserole of water. She splashed, grinning toothlessly.

“Well?” I said when Betty had scooted off to bury the plastic pony in a grave of throw pillows. “You seem like you have something to say.”

Sylvia nodded, pressing her fingertips to her forehead in a way that managed to lay the talons flat. Her face had a deflated look, and I had a brief and terrifying vision of her plunging her nails into her forehead, where they would sink as if in a Jell-O mold. For some reason, her anxiety made me feel impatient with her instead of sympathetic. “Talk fast. Betty’s on a tear today.”

“You let her control things too much,” Sylvia snapped. “She decides everything around here.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Just how, I wondered,
could I make things be any other way? It wasn’t like if I told Betty to sit down and wait quietly while the grown-ups were talking, she would. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried. I was getting pretty tired of Sylvia acting like she had done everything I was doing but better, when she’d had a husband at home, and money, and the support of an entire extended family, and a fucking yard. Of course things seemed easier then. Anyway, why was Sylvia being so grouchy with me when we’d just had such a breakthrough? Hello, the dancing? The dress? I wanted my conversational money back.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— That’s not what I meant to say. I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “Hey, you don’t think there’s any chance Harry’s in New Orleans, do you?”

“New Orleans? Uh, the thought hadn’t occurred to me, no. Why, that storm?”

“Have you been watching the news? It looks like the apocalypse down there.”

“Sylvia. You didn’t come here to talk to me about Hurricane Katrina, I know you didn’t. Spit it out.”

Sylvia couldn’t seem to make eye contact with me. Never a good sign. “Fred and I had a meeting with our accountant, and last night we had a long talk and went over everything.”

Rose slammed a fist into the water, splashing me full in the face. “Okay,” I said, alarm starting to simmer in my belly.

“It’s just—it’s a lot worse than we thought. The money. It’s been obvious that we weren’t doing so great for some time. It’s so sad, when I think of my husband starting this business, of how excited he was. I remember the night he came home from a bar and said to me, ‘Sylvie my sweet,’ that’s what he always called me, he said, ‘The boys and me, we were all drinking beer, and I thought, Gosh, I’d like a salty snack.’ He’d asked the boys, what if they were selling bags of peanuts and things there, wouldn’t they buy one right now,
and they all said sure they would, sure, that would go great with beer. And so we started that very weekend, tying up cellophane bags of mixed nuts, and he went around with them in Fred’s toy wagon, no kidding, selling them to bars. And that’s how it all started. You believe that? He had a good idea, a very good idea.” She tapped a nail on the table for emphasis. Rose watched and tapped her spoon tentatively on her high-chair tray in the same rhythm. “And he believed in his idea. And look, that was forty-five years ago already. He raised a family on that idea.”

Betty had disappeared into one of the bedrooms, and it was quiet in that bone-chilling way every parent of a toddler knows and dreads, but I’d never seen Sylvia in such a quivery state, even after Harry left, when she just seemed mad, so despite my better judgment, I let her continue without investigating. Sylvia looked me in the eye, and I was glad I’d let her go on. She was looking at me as if I were another adult in the situation for once. Though I knew a decision had been made that would affect me and that I had not been consulted, I still appreciated the look. “It’s just not working anymore. And with Harry gone—and— Our accountant thinks we should file for bankruptcy. I mean, he says we are. Bankrupt. Really.”

Even though I’d seen it coming, I felt sucker-punched. “Really?”

“Really. We’ve tried calling all our vendors’ loans, and you know we’ve reduced our operating costs to the bare bones. And there’s just—there’s nothing else to do, I guess. That’s what Morty says.”

No more Ever So Fresh? No more bags of stale candy and nuts as holiday presents? No more ghost-town office? No more family business? No more family business. No more
money
.

“But what about Harry?” I said, panicked. Harry! I’d never gotten used to not worrying about him, fretting over his daily well-being, and maybe I never would, no matter how angry with him I got. Thinking about Harry in this way, when he’d become in so
many ways an abstract absence, made me almost double over with guilt. What
about
Harry? He was still a person out there somewhere. He was still a person I had married. How on earth could I ever explain to him the thing with Sam? The thing with the rusalka? I had kissed another man. I had tried to die. These were not nice things to do. It hurt, physically, sharp as a gut ache, as simultaneously compressing and expanding as a labor pain.

He should be the one worrying, not you. How does he explain to you why he left you alone with your two children, with his two children? He is the one who is wrong.

He’s going to be devastated. Have a heart.

You already have been devastated. And I do have a heart, thank you. Yours.

“What about when he comes back? You just tell him, what, ‘Sorry we closed the business while you were gone’? Don’t you need him to sign off on these things? What is he supposed to do?”

Sylvia looked pained. She said quietly, “We’re starting to think of that as ‘if.’ If he comes back. Not when.”

“Since when? Says who? The detective? The police? Fred? What was this, a family committee decision at another mysterious family meeting? What if I’m still saying ‘when’?”

“Of course, honey. Of course you are. We all are. But in terms of the business, he’s part of why we’re in this mess in the first place. We assume— There’s a lot of money missing— Don’t make me say it.”

I slumped down in my chair. It had been too long since Betty had appeared. I would have to go see what horrors she’d inflicted on our security deposit this time. “What am I supposed to do? About money, I mean?”

Sylvia reached out and patted my arm. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry, dear. We’ll figure it out. We’ll all pitch in and help, of course we will. And now that I won’t be working, if you find a full-time
job, I can watch the girls, you know I’d be happy to do that. My house is paid for. If it ever came down to it, you know that you and the girls would be welcome to come live with me.”

Sweet Jesus. “Could you hold on for a second?” I said, unsuccessful at masking the tremor in my voice. “Could you just hold on for just one second?” I got up and peeked into the girls’ room. Nothing. Peeked into our room. Er, my room. Betty was facing the full-length mirror, wearing a shirt and pretied tie of Harry’s and a pair of my fanciest flats, with Anne’s perfect, just completed veil, now defiled by menstrual smears of red and purple marker. “Betty!” I cried, and when she turned around, I startled at her gruesome clown’s-mask face, done up in old-lady unguents. “Oh my God! No, no! Where did you even find so much makeup?” The war-paint smudges of eye shadow, the lifeguard nose of whitish concealer, the loop-the-loops of crimson lipstick. She looked terrifying, and even more so when she cackled. “I wook pretty!” she insisted. Sylvia’s purse gaped open on the floor.

“That veil! Do you have any idea— Agh, Betty! No! Bad! What is
wrong
with you?”

Sylvia appeared behind me, balancing a soggy Rose on her hip. She took one look at Betty and started laughing. Really cracking up, hyena gasping, yukking it up. I took Rose from her. “It’s not— Betty, it’s not funny. Not okay.” But Betty’s pleased smile widened as she watched Grandma double over with giggles, and I had to leave the room before beating them both to an intergenerational pulp. The fucking veil. I felt so shuddery with guilt and fury that even smiling turned my stomach, the way you feel the first time you laugh after someone close to you dies.
Betty, sweetheart, I am trying to love you unconditionally, but you are making it difficult.

Sylvia cleaned Betty up and even forgave her smashing of the
department-store lipstick, and the next time she came over, horribly, she handed my innocent toddler a pink plush purse stocked with a plastic compact, lipstick, and mirror. Not exactly the sort of forward thinking I wanted to instill in my daughter and, more important (as I was beginning to realize), rewarding bad behavior.

In the meantime, I redoubled my efforts to drum up new sewing jobs, as if I could stave off the hounds at the door—Jesus, bankruptcy!—with good old American hard work. It was one thing to have a disappeared husband but another thing altogether to have a disappeared jobless husband too off the grid to even apply for unemployment. I entertained melodramatic visions of burning furniture for warmth, of the electricity being shut off, of eating condiment sandwiches on fetid Dumpster bread, of having to cancel our Y membership. I did the math. At the rate I was going, I could support the girls with my sewing so long as no one ever got sick. Or wanted dessert.

What made it worse was my nagging sense that the rusalka was getting bored with me. It was like realizing that a man is falling out of love with you. I was terrified of being alone again, unprotected against the pall of depression, with no watery presence between me and the abyss; I felt desperate to keep her happy. We weren’t gallivanting around the city and trying new things and flirting and feeling full of possibility. I wondered if she felt like she’d been hoodwinked. Here she was, stuck in my sweatshop of an apartment, sewing each night until dawn, worrying about money. What probably seemed to her a chance for ribald New York City adventure had turned out to be a glorified indentured servitude. It probably was a lot more pleasant in the sea. But I knew what she wanted. I knew, I thought, how to keep her.